Contest: Associate Forum Images with Plants

It's December and we're holding a fun activity that will have you exploring the forums, finding photos that have been posted, and associating those photos with plants in the database. Open to find out more!

As you probably know, anybody can post photos to threads in our forums. It's quick and easy, and there are hundreds of thousands of them. On the other hand, if you know exactly what plant the photo is of, you can post the photo to that plant's entry in our database, and then include the photo in your post using the db_photo tag. This has many advantages, primarily that the photo in the thread now shows which plant it is, and people can click to get more information about that specific plant.

Consider this example:

This is what a photo looks like that was just uploaded as a regular image, without being associated with a plant:

Notice that when you click on the 2nd one, you get lots of options. You can give acorns and/or a thumb to the image itself, and you can click to view details about that plant. This is a really cool feature of ATP that a lot of people enjoy making use of.

Well, what happens if a photo is posted to the forums and hasn't been associated with a plant? Anybody can come along and do it for the poster! Open the image fullsize and you'll see an option at the bottom that says "Associate with a plant in the database." Just click on that, find the plant it belongs to, and you're done. You get an acorn reward for doing this each time, plus the original photo uploaded also gets an acorn! A win-win-win for everyone.

Well, starting now and ending at 6:00pm CT on December 19th, we're going to count up how many forum photos are associated with plants. Whoever associates the most images will receive a bonus of 250 acorns from @zuzu! 2nd place will get 100 acorns, and 3rd place gets 50 acorns. This is on top of the half an acorn bonus you get automatically for each image you do.

Thank you, Zuzu, for your generous donation!

A few notes: We'll only be counting images that you associate from other people. If you upload your own images, that doesn't count. This contest is intended to get people to associate other members' images. Also, please be sure that the photo indeed belongs to the plant that you're associating it with. Don't guess. If you're not sure, don't do it.

One final note: If you are a person who would rather that your photos do not be associated with plants in the database, then you can opt out. Go to your preferences area and find the part that says "Allow your forum photos to be associated with plants in the database?" Set that to "No" and save your changes, and then nobody will be able to do this to your photos.